Category Archives: Best Practices

As an email marketer and writer, I’m constantly looking around for good resources. Unfortunately, most of the email marketing tips, tricks, and guides I read are just rehashing the same old stuff: Know your audience Be informative Send at the right time Etc., etc., etc. Honestly, these are the things you should know by now. They should be ingrained in your day-to-day efforts. Where are the applicable, useful things that can be applied today to make an impact on email marketing? Below, I’ve compiled some of the things we take into consideration when creating and deploying successful email marketing campaigns:…

The following is part of series of guest posts from Windows IT Pro that takes an in-depth look at SMTP. Last week we shared the first in a series of posts on the history of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) from our friends at Windows IT Pro. The first post explained the origins of SMTP and how it’s influenced how we email today. It ended by saying: The use of IP means that we can depend on SMTP to eventually get the message contents to a server, but what happens to it after that is up to the server. Imagine…

The following is a guest post from Josh Bland at TechnologyAdvice. Jillian Wohlfarth, Senior Manager of Content at SendGrid, was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series to share her insight on the intersection of sales, marketing, and technology. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Josh Bland, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders. She sat down to discuss major email marketing trends and challenges, including deliverability, spam reporting, choosing the right content, and using data as a compass for email strategy. Below are a few highlights from our conversation:…

Seasonal marketing isn’t just for major holidays like New Years, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving. It also covers holidays like Father’s Day. Our email inspiration today comes from our customer Fitbit, who’s showing Father’s Day some love with their email marketing! The email below not only follows many of the best practices we preach (clean design, one call to action, easy unsubscribe, and more), it also employs two powerful email marketing techniques: urgency and incentives. Urgency By using the subject line “ENDS TODAY: Free Shipping for Father’s Day!” they immediately grab the attention of the recipient. I know I received…

We worked with our friends at Windows IT Pro to take an in-depth look at the history of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). The following is a guest post from their team that covers the origins of SMTP, the evolution of email, and what SMTP does, and doesn’t do. SMTP Defined The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) has a name that perfectly describes its origin and intended purpose. SMTP was built to be a lightweight, easy-to-implement means to transfer plain-text messages between devices. The original SMTP standard distinguished between a mail transport agent (MTA)—what modern administrators would call a server—and…

Merriam-Webster defines strategy as “a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time.” We created our most recent SlideShare around helping you construct your email marketing strategy because it is a longterm game, and we understand it can be easy to get caught up in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. We structured our deck around SendGrid’s mantra: Send the right message, To the right person, At the right time, With the right frequency. We shared some helpful “final thoughts” at the end of the deck (slides 32-36) that I…

Recently, we’ve gone back to the basics to shed some light on email terms and frameworks, like SPF and DKIM, that are essential to email delivery. Today, we’d like to highlight one of the most important tools you have in your email delivery toolkit: feedback loops. We’ll give a brief overview of what email feedback loops are, how you should implement them, and which ISPs provide them. Feedback loops defined: A feedback loop (FBL) is a service offered by some ISPs that report back complaints (when a subscriber hits the spam or junk button in their inbox) to senders. It’s…